A healthy relationship helps everyone involved in some meaningful way. The rhythm feels fluid, natural, and balanced. Interaction is personal, because participants listen actively and respond with emotion to each other. And the benefit endures, growing deeper over time.

These hallmarks of a healthy relationship are also the four key attributes of a sticky, i.e. sustainably engaging, product or service.

Design for sustainable engagement is design for healthy relationships.

But Design ≠ Design

I use the term design here for simplicity, but it’s not limited to designers. Like Alex Schleifer, I see product or service design as a collaborative effort between all problem solvers, from content strategists to engineers to the end-user.

So This Is Part of My Playbook

For some time now, I’ve been trying to fit my process into a coherent structure, to create a playbook for myself. However, I quickly realized that I was doing it backwards: the process should follow the challenge, not the other way around.

My work for the past few years has been about helping people make healthy choices. In my eyes, the biggest challenge there is keeping people engaged in the relationship once we’ve started it.

So this is my answer to that challenge, an attempt to understand what a product or service needs to be to engage people in a sustainable way. I don’t intend this to be exhaustive, nor to be perfect. But I do hope it’s useful for you, dear reader, and for myself ?

The Ladder of Sustainable Engagement

When crafting something that needs to inspire people's interest and keep them engaged, we can view it as being somewhere on this ladder of having four attributes: meaning, rhythm, personality, and endurance.

Design Tools

For each step in the ladder, there are certain design tools that help us with infusing the relevant attribute into our product or service. This overview isn't exhaustive, and there is some healthy overlap between steps.

Step 1: Meaning

Understand what people really need and give it to them.

If your creation isn’t meaningful for people, no amount of "great design" will make it successful.

Design Research provides the starting point. We can anticipate what people might consider valuable by interviewing people, observing them, and immersing ourselves in the worlds they inhabit.

The 30 Elements of Consumer Value: A HierarchyIdea in Brief The Challenge What customers value in a product or service can be hard to pin down. Often an emotional…d3e.co

Lean Startup and other frameworks like it provide us with powerful methodologies to test assumptions and evaluate just how meaningful our value propositions really are.

Emotional Data Visualization helps people intuitively understand abstract patterns in ways that inspire action. For example, Mindbloom's Life Game app visualizes a person's life as a tree. If the "My Relationships" leaf withers and turns brown, it should inspire me to spend more time with my family.

Pathos

Design empathy helps us peek through the emotional lensthrough which people perceive what we make. This helps us when we want people to bond emotionally with our products.

Process

The process follows the challenge, so as the challenge changes, the process must adapt. Whatever the process though, teams work best when people collaborate tightly, have creative freedom, and focus on value.

Prototyping

Show always beats tell. Make an artifact that represents your concept and provoke your stakeholders with it. This lets you test assumptions and make sure your idea creates the value it needs to.

It doesn't matter if all you have is a scenario to role-play, a sketch on paper, or a clay model. Create a prototype and show it to the people who need to build it, the people who need to buy it, the people who need to sell it, and most importantly, the people who need to use it.